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Weekly Open Thread with Keyboard Cat

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Hosting this week’s Open Thread is a crosstitched Keyboard Cat. Please natter/chatter/vent/rant on anything* you like over this weekend and throughout the week.

a cat wearing a t-shirt playing a keyboard
Crossstitch Keyboard Cat via Neatorama: 30 Great Geeky Crossstitches

So, what have you been up to? What would you rather be up to? What’s been awesome/awful?
Reading? Watching? Making? Meeting?
What has [insert awesome inspiration/fave fansquee/guilty pleasure/dastardly ne’er-do-well/threat to all civilised life on the planet du jour] been up to?

* Netiquette footnotes:
* There is no off-topic on the Weekly Open Thread, but consider whether your comment would be on-topic on any recent thread and thus better belongs there.
* If your comment touches on topics known to generally result in thread-jacking, you will be expected to take the discussion to #spillover instead of overshadowing the social/circuit-breaking aspects of this thread.

84 thoughts on Weekly Open Thread with Keyboard Cat

  1. I was just called a Republican on Facebook, after daring to suggest that self sacrifice isn’t something that only Jesus cornered the market on.

    …..

      1. There’s not much I can offer by way of explanation. A question was posed ” If we are all gods children, what makes Jesus so special” and several very zealous Christians said it was his sacrifice. I simply pointed out that self sacrifice was NOT invented by Jesus (assuming he existed, of course) and people throughout history sacrificed themselves for others prior to Christianity. That got me called the C word and a Republican by a woman who believes I was saying (I guess) that Jesus sucks or something. Why she would think a Republican would say Jesus Sucks is beyond me, but such is the mentality of the overly religious in this part of Texas.

        1. I was just spun around in my chair (literally, I spun myself around a couple times in my swivelly chair thinking it was maybe inner ear problems on my part) by the jump from the one to the other. That there’s somewhere in the country where being called a Republican in that manner is an insult shouldn’t surprise me. I remember loling my way through high-school with Chick Tracts, where the only thing worse than atheism, D&D, and evolution are those damn Catholics.

        2. That got me called the C word and a Republican by a woman who believes I was saying (I guess) that Jesus sucks or something.

          I hate being called a Christian too.

    2. I’ve been on some other sites and been called Republican Right Wing Nazi, Left Wing Commie, Teabagger, Marxist, Obama supporter, Romney supporter and a few other choice words all within a few paragraphs of each other.

  2. YAY Keyboard Cat!

    I’m in my first week of work still, and all I’ve been doing is studying Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and PostGreSQL. All I can say is that I really wish I could just stick with good ‘ol PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL. Learning those other three things is a huge pain. X_X Just last night I was having dreams about encountering horrible problems with RoR. Yuck. At least I’m progressing very quickly. I’ll begin my actual work this Monday.

    Also, I’ve recently become my father’s assistant for an informal web development course he’s teaching at the mosque close by. One of the students is a 12-year-old girl. I admire her so much; she already knows Python, and I can tell that she has a passion for programming and in-depth understanding of web technologies. For her assignment, she even created an entire HTML calendar all by herself, complete with multicolored table cells.

    And so I hate it when my father says things like “You’re the special student of this class” and “You’re like a daughter to me” to her in front of everyone. I feel that such remarks worsen her shyness and lack of confidence as she is already very shy, quiet, and under-confident. Moreover, last class he kept asking the students to help her even though she was doing just fine by herself. Regardless, I really hope she shines some day.

    1. It sounds to me like your dad is an abusive asshole. I know how incredibly painful that can be, but nothing helped me deal with my parental abuse more than explicitly naming it to myself. Literally everyone else will tell you it is love. It. is. not.

  3. The new Batman game appears to have absolutely zero females, even over or hyper sexualized ones. This angers me because its a game about assassins and many of the most compelling assassins are female. Besides, I’m a Cosplayer and I want something to wear to the midnight release, and I dislike cosplaying against my gender.

    I’m just super pissed and weirdly tired and resigned. I want to be a fan. Why won’t they let me?

    2. It’s a Batman game, and doesn’t include any of the iconic female Batman villains? I’m not surprised by not including the heroic women (particularly since the way they’ve been ignored/rewritten terribly since the reboot), but not even Catwoman or Poison Ivy?

  4. I don’t know if other people have seen this floating around already, but I found this conversation between Julie Blair and Cyd Nova really interesting.

    JULIE BLAIR : “I’m wondering what accountability would look like in this situation?” — One thing I want to add is that people are going to have to be willing to accomodate trans women’s needs to enter/create a new type of discourse for their needs and ultimately their inclusion. A lot of this language and policy brought to the ~lesbian-slanted queer~ community from ~radical organizing~ backgrounds is a synthesis of not one but TWO areas of community that we have often been barred from. I’m using tildes here to not intone sarcasm as usual, but to mark words I know are clumsy, and the best I can come up with. Approaching the problem this way already has trans women in a subordinate position at the very start of a conversation, you know? It starts to make me feel like puritans are telling me how to behave before we begin talking. And again, I feel like movements are just now — and only for right now — being formed with us, and we’re figuring out ourselves how we tend to communicate and what the methods and patterns are. I’m not trying to be 1970’s Leslie Feinberg on a podium right now or trying to be some annointed and appointed figurehead, I am just speaking as a pretty sensitive observer and participant.

    JULIE BLAIR : What I *wonder*… is what would it look like if trans women were talking about their issues and lives and experiences, and other sects of this community listenbed for as long as we’ve listened to you, and they listened so hard they changed their minds about us, and began participating in OUR dialogues. I have absolutely no way to even picture how that could ever happen, what it would be like, and what the result would be. No way to imagine it at all. It makes me really sad.

    1. Fuck yeah to THIS:

      The get off the internet / meet me in the streets “anthem” doesn’t really work when you are terrified of being able to speak your mind in person. And that is why I really resent that line in the sand, “My thoughts are real because I can talk in person / You are just an internet troll.” It makes me wonder: and what ELSE do they believe about themselves to be more REAL than what a trans woman has?

    2. I think that cis folk – and especially cis lesbians – ought to read this to understand why trans women are shy and reticent to participate in cis women-sponsored events that try to be inclusive and don’t quite get it. It’s that our inclusion is always conditional, we have to behave in a certain way, not take up space, scrape and bow our gratefulness for even being invited. Like in my town (Philadelphia, PA, USA) there’s a Dyke March that is supposedly inclusive, and yeah, I did go once, and I was like one of two or three trans women there, and I know that there’s a hell of a lot of trans women in this city and why aren’t we coming to these events? And yet we come in the thousands to the annual Trans Health Conference in this city. I think that Julie Blair gives some insight on why this happens.

      I’m interested to know what happened at Hey Queen. Googling didn’t help – all the links lead to this interview or to Hey Queen’s website.

      1. I’ll see if I can turn up an article, but my understanding (and obvs the standard disclaimers about being pretty distant from the whole thing in Australia and being fairly sketchy on all the details) is that Hey Queen invited JD Samson to DJ an event (called “They Queen”), some trans* women pointed out (given that JD Samson continues to play Michfest and that there’s an ongoing boycott campaign against artists who support that festival) that booking Samson was pretty hostile to trans* women’s participation in the space, and the standard pushback explosion happened.

        2. Ugh. That tag led to a terrifying trip down the transmisogynist rabbit hole. Be back once I’ve finished scrubbing out the inside of my skull.

        3. I clicked on the top-left entry, the one that begins with “Almost all the feelings I had / have surrounding yesterday’s fiasco…”. I didn’t go through the rest of the tagged articles. Probably should have so that I could have posted a content note with that link … sorry, Li.

      2. Galla, this kind of reminds me of what’s been going on at Daisy Deadhead’s blog ever since she got pushback here for “asking” trans women why they don’t go after their real enemies. I’m not used to being personally vilified in that way for my alleged self-righteousness, “poor me” victimhood, insufficient commitment to freedom of speech, and cowardice (not only for allegedly failing to confront my “real” enemies in the “real” world, but for failing to respond quickly enough to their interrogation — there, not here, because of course this place is too hostile for poor Daisy). I simultaneously want to respond, and feel sick at the thought of having to respond, especially the way I already felt compelled to respond to an attack on my mother.

        But of course neither Daisy nor her acolytes is transphobic or cissexist. They’re just asking, after all; hey, what’s the problem?

        1. I’ve had similar run-ins on this issue with her in the past, including her making personal attacks against my father. I’m sorry that I didn’t step up to the plate this time around. I’m just … tired of running into this again and again – and it’s by no means just Daisy – and I’m unwell and withdrawn.

        2. I understand completely, believe me. No apologies necessary. Dealing with this kind of thing is definitely not good for my — or most people’s — psyches.

          To be fair, it wasn’t Daisy herself, but one of her supporters, who — after I mentioned something my mother did once in New York when I was a child (knock to the ground some hate literature being peddled by some old Nazi from a table on a sidewalk near where we lived), as an example of why I can’t always get too upset at someone who knocks offensive leaflets off a table — implied that my mother was a coward and wouldn’t have dared doing something similar in the face of a real Nazi. Which is about as far from the truth as anything can be.

          I know, of course, that saying anything about any of this here will be cited as another example of my running away to a safe audience where I can show off my victimization and be patted on the head by my so-called “posse,” but so be it.

        3. Heh, “Donna’s posse.”

          I find it highly amusing when TERFs and other people knee-deep in cis privilege think that trans* people who stand up for themselves are really a part of some kind of powerful lobby (think “transsexual lobby” from Janice Raymond’s awful book).

        6. Seriously.

          Now I kind of want to start putting up stickers saying “Donna L has a posse,” like those old stickers featuring Andre the Giant that used to show up on lampposts and suchlike in the East Village.

        7. “asking” trans women why they don’t go after their real enemies.

          That’s like saying “don’t go after people who think all trans women should be imprisoned when there are people out there who think all trans woman should be tortured.”

          Why can’t you go after both?

  5. Hey, could anyone point out the term I’m looking for?

    In intersectional writings, something that pop ups fairly often is something about privileged people’s “___ aggressions”, and I’m looking for the ___. I’m fairly sure it isn’t “passive aggressions”, but it’s similar, I think it’s about these really aggressive things privileged people can say, that by the norms of society don’t sound aggressive, and often aren’t intentionally/deliberately aggressive, ie the privileged person isn’t aware of their aggression. If anyone could fill out the term I’d be really thankful!

  6. From what I can tell, the past few Science Fiction Writers of America bulletins have gone like this:

    1) Woman in chain mail bikini on the cover.

    2) Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg write long dialogue comparing the physical charms of various “lady editors and writers” and other professionals in the field. Because whether or not such women give them boners is totes worthy of publication in the magazine of a professional organization.

    3) SFWA publishes an article written by a dude saying women shouldn’t get so mad; they should maintain a “quiet dignity as a a woman should.” Like Barbie. No shit. Maintain your dignity by modelling yourself after a plastic fashion doll.

    4) Resnick and Malzburg publish an article claiming to be the victims of Nazis bent on censorship. Because being well-established, widely published authors with a regular column in a professional magazine is totes like being persecuted by Nazis. Or something.

    E. Catherine Tobler leaves SFWA here.

    Kameron Hurley does her best to explain the difference between being persecuted and being an old white guy whose spent so long marinating in his privilege that his fingers have pruned here.

    2. Holy hell, I think I had a rage induced out of body experience at “quiet dignity”. Fucking hell.

      1. Right? You know why Barbie’s so quiet? Because she’s a fucking piece of plastic, that’s why. The fact that Henderson thinks actual human beings should model themselves that is enraging.

        1. I don’t think he has any idea what girls do with their Barbies, or he wouldn’t have said that.

          One of mine had a shaved head and a black electric tape dress; and she definitely didn’t take any sass from Ken.

  7. I haven’t seen this get much coverage yet (didn’t make the front page of UK news sites).

    The inquest for primary school teacher Lucy Meadows, who was hounded by the Daily Mail and others for being trans, has concluded with a verdict of suicide and a damning indictment of her treatment by the press: link

    1. You beat me to it – I just came to this thread to post about her!

      My fondest memory of All in the Family has always been when Edith finally snapped and yelled at Archie, “Stifle, stifle, stifle!!!”

      And if they had to make Ariadne Oliver an American when Peter Ustinov filmed Dead Man’s Folly, Ms Stapleton did it about as well as anyone who was plausible at the time could have done.

  9. [CN: anti-trans* violence, hate crime apologia]

    I just saw a thread on this god-awful forum I visit from time to time. The person who created the thread shared a video about a man getting arrested for shooting a trans* girl because she “deceived” him. And the thread creator is all like “Its a harsh lesson that he [sic] needed to learn,Im sure he [sic] wont be tricking other straight men.”

    Just what I fucking need during this anxiety attack I’m currently having. I feel sick.

    1. I’m so sorry, Aaliyah. These attitudes are both disgusting and completely predictable. Either we’re ugly and pathetic and ridiculous, or we’re deceivers. Or both (since of course, once our “deception” is uncovered, we become ugly and pathetic and ridiculous by definition.)

      Do you get anything positive out of visiting that particular forum? If not, maybe you’d be better off not visiting it. I don’t know exactly why I sometimes look at places on the Internet like that, such as some of the websites specifically devoted to hating trans people. I guess I tell myself that I need to be reminded how common it still is to despise people like us, so I don’t get complacent. Or whatever. But it isn’t good for me, and it sounds like it isn’t good for you, either. Of course, there’s a reasonable chance of running into expressions of anti-trans bigotry on a regular basis just about anywhere, including here. It can’t be avoided. But maybe it isn’t necessary to increase the risk by going to places that are “god-awful” under the best of circumstances!

      1. You’re right. I have the urge to argue with those people because I find the thread very upsetting, but I’m not going to argue with them anymore because it’s just making me feel worse. Especially when I’m almost shaking with anxiety (for other reasons). They’ll never listen anyway.

      2. Speaking of awful anti-trans* people, I learned about factcheckme a while ago. I really regret visiting her blog. What a horrible person.

        1. Indeed. Vile. But, hey, it’s just words, right? She couldn’t possibly be doing any “real” harm.

    2. That’s disgusting, and I’m really sorry you had to see that. No. I’m sorry some scumbag made that happen, and I’m sorry he’s getting support from others of his ilk. And I’m sorry that it made its horrible way into your life.

      It’s just awful.

  10. Hey macavity_kitsune, I couldn’t find a place to ask on your own blog, but if you happen to read this, would you be comfortable sharing the content of your recent comments on SV’s “Fauxgress” post that we never got the chance to read? I was very interested to hear your thoughts in particular then when I returned they were no more.

    (you can email me privately at subversiville at gmail dot com if you’re comfortable with that/don’t feel like airing interblog nonsense out in the open)

    1. Hey gratuitous,

      There’s a screenshot I took of my comments linked here, since I was expecting to get banhammered for that. And I don’t feel ashamed of my actions, so I don’t have a problem talking about them in an open thread here.

      I just…I guess I lost my shit, a bit, about stuff I’ve been seeing happen. I don’t think I was terribly impolite, personally, and I certainly wasn’t making up or exaggerating anything. I became incredibly disillusioned with things over time, and….tl;dr I didn’t spend a year of my life emotionally/physically extricating myself from a religious cult, just to wind up in a secular one. Or at least that’s how it feels to me, at this point.

      1. I like a lot of the commentators on Shakesville, but what I have seen from the moderators is terrible – very disappointing. I’m so sorry you had to deal with all of that shit, Mac. I think you were very polite and not unreasonable at all in your response to that article.

        1. Yeah, I definitely kept reading longer than I would otherwise have because the commenters were pretty awesome (when they weren’t scared to post, anyway). And it wasn’t a lot of shit, really; more like I watched badness happen to others and got pissed off. But thanks for the feedback!

      3. Wow, Mac, that’s just…I don’t even. I’ve read SV for YEARS, since like 2005, and I read it w/o comments on Google Reader since summer of 2008. I can remember one, maybe two, threads I’ve bounced into in the past three or four years. Now that Google is phasing out Reader, it’s the first time I’ve been reading comment threads on the regular in a long time and I feel like I’ve stepped into a fucking twilight zone.

        Thanks so much for sharing; turns out you said a lot of what I’ve been thinking for a few weeks and it got deleted. FTR, I’ve been getting the impression that not apologizing profusely before disagreeing is considered “bad faith commenting,” and I thought there was nothing inappropriate about your comment. I’ve seen them write off criticism as being from an “organized hate movement” because of some hostile tumblrs out there, and it just seems incredibly disproportionate.

        1. Now that Google is phasing out Reader, it’s the first time I’ve been reading comment threads on the regular in a long time and I feel like I’ve stepped into a fucking twilight zone.

          Yeah, I used to comment sometimes and read pretty faithfully, especially because blogarounds and 101s that I actually found really useful in conversations with non-feminists. I started seeing some weirdness last summer, when I was basically home and sick for the entire holidays, so I had time to read and refresh quickly, because I was bored as fuck, and then… I noticed a lot of perfectly innocuous comments disappearing, or being edited to look bad, etc, etc, so quickly I wouldn’t have seen it if I’d turned up once a day, like I used to do before. And then it was all Nope Nope Nope from there.

          I’ve seen them write off criticism as being from an “organized hate movement” because of some hostile tumblrs out there, and it just seems incredibly disproportionate.

          Yeah, I’ve seen most if not all of those tumblrs. One’s outright hateful and shitty, and I do not condone its treatment of Melissa and the other mods. Even if I think they’re a pack of unscrupulous jackals at this point, they still deserve respect as human beings. (It’s called lol-shakesville or something.) But the rest are all pretty damn reasonable. And fuck knows, if I hadn’t found them, and gotten screencapped evidence of stuff I thought I’d noticed, I’d have probably written off the badness as my own brain drinking the krazy juice again.

          Also, I got deleted AND banned. Which is hilarious, because I said I wasn’t going back, and I wasn’t planning on going back. Very “You can’t quit, you’re FIRED!!!eleventy!” of them.

      4. I don’t know if my opinion matters to you, but I admire the guts it took to post those comments over at SV. I used to be a regular reader and sometime commenter, and I remember feeling such an overwhelming fear of posting anything even slightly disagreeable – or anything that could be deliberately misconstrued to have offensive implications – that I would hardly say anything. Eventually, I had to recognize the suspiciously familiar smell of bullshit in a community full of women too afraid to voice an opinion that wasn’t meticulously self-effacing and agreeable. So I left.

        But, I just silently withdrew. I wish I’d had it in me to tell them how I felt.

        1. It does matter to me, and thank you, igglanova. That was exactly what I went through, too, and I stopped commenting there several months ago (until recent shit got so rage-inducing I just couldn’t shut up. I’m bad at shutting up :P). But yeah, I recognise that pervasive sort of fear, and the way it gets to you. It’s not remotely okay to do to people. I mean, yes, Feministe mods the hell out of inappropriateness, but outside of that, I’ve said things to mods and disagreed loudly with mods and still been treated like a goddamn human being in this space. Even when I was taking a seriously unpopular side. Even when I was taking the wrong side, and didn’t realise it for an embarrassingly long time. Just…gaah.

          And honestly, I think you’re the better person for just dropping off that site, from some angles. Maybe shouting into a vacuum isn’t really good for anything, and just makes bad things worse. I don’t know. Fuck knows it’s not like the mods gave a shit.

        2. I agree, I’m in awe that you tried to keep up the good fight over at SV, Mac. The comment section there utterly frightens me, and I’ve always stayed away because I was sure I would get chased off anyway for breaching their bizarre commenting culture/rules. And it’s too bad, because I often think Melissa has some insightful stuff to say and a sometimes unique pov that is really interesting.

  11. So, my claim for disability was rejected. I’ve finally managed to get in to lodge my appeal, this time with a lot more medical documentation (even though all my professionals are surprised I was rejected in the first place). We’ll see how this turns out.

    3. I wish you the best of luck on your appeal. I “lucked out” by getting mine on the first try so I didn’t have to go through the appeal process personally, but my best friend ended up having to hire a lawyer to get hers, so hopefully yours doesn’t come down to that.

  12. Weird sort of intersection of feminism and anti-science. NPR did a thing about some Turkish creationist with a cult of Islamic Stepford women on the same day I walked in to a serious conversation two coworkers were having about if mermaids were real (probably they wisely decided).

    Following up on it taught me about the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, which heyo is a favorite knick knack of some radical feminists and TERFS because it’s chock full of good ole gender essentialism backed with bits of evo psych and a sprinkling of some earth mother kinda stuff. Then today I saw some of the latter group noting how nice and respectful conservative Christians are to women unlike the mean men in dresses. The circle was complete! Self prescribed ice cream and red wine, maybe a bit of crying if I can muster the strength. No more internet for a bit methinks.

  13. I moved into a new apartment today! It was not nearly as stressful as I thought it would be, even though it took longer than expected. The overwhelming feeling is relief- I’ve had bad living situation after bad living situation since I moved to NYC, and it’s really nice to be in a place that is bright and clean and welcoming. And the view is marvelous!

  14. Anyone here into Orphan Black? I just consumed the entire first season in a day. It’s pretty remarkable all around.

    1. It’s fucking awesome. Tatiana Maslany’s performance, Jesus. I forget sometimes that she’s playing everybody.

      1. Right?! You just forget, and then you realize all 3 characters on screen are the same person and you’re just like “praise be Tatiana Maslany!”

  15. After three attempts (first two of which were good caps but not the berets I wanted) and a lot of mucking about with knitting inserts and re-knitting failed brims, I have succeeded in making a cable-knit beret, complete with tassel! (aka “good way to cover up the dodgy bits of the pattern at the back”).

    Front

    Side

    Back

    Wonder of wonders, Mr K has promised not to borrow this one. Not sure if it’s the colour, the tassel or the three-days’-work I put into it, or the fact he’s already taken over the first two!

    2. Nice!

      I taught myself how to knit freshman year of college, started on a scarf. I think it’s still in my closet, about the size of a pot-holder.

    1. Just rereading and realizing with all the shitstormery going around I should be less coy.

      Her brothers still have her back and those expressions of support and respect made me weep.

        1. Yes, that’s an awesome story!

          The Kittehs’ Unpaid Help
          I get a little giggle every time I see your screen name. Also, nice job on the tassel tam, congrats!

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